New Link

check out the new link, "Kari in Ghana." This is my friend from AmeriCorps, Las Cruces. She's a visual artist and she just got to Ghana, Africa for her two-year service in the PeaceCorps. She's from Ohio so we maintain a little midwest perspective here. Nice girl, we miss her, and very interesting blog (she's in AFRICA!).

Here's Kari when we hiked the Needle:

nyc choss

just got back from the big apple. this trip confirmed what I learned on my first trip there--I will have to live in this city at some point. basically we had a blast excepting the cat pissing on molly's sleeping bag, which has now been rectified (the cat was euthenized).

here are some bullet points:

>small, ultra-cool sake bar called decibel, with ben.
>staying up until the sun got up with jim and ben the first night, up eachother cracked.
>brunch on a patio on st. mark's place, surely one of the best people-watching streets in the world.
>moved uptown to go to the garth clark gallery, met mark del vechio.
>went to MoMA and saw the new Serra exhibit. jaw dropping. saw the 5th floor during target free friday nights. the crowds and the art equally jaw dropping.
>hung back at apartment, drank beers on back patio and strummed the evening away.
>dinner at banjara indian, wonderful indian that made howard halucinate.
>connoy meets up, we all make way back to midtown for karaoke.
>karoake was cathartic and drunken
>?
>breakfast at ben's, listening to records, washing up, then to
>coney island for the "mermaid parade," half naked women painted like sea creatures, drunken and bikini-clad men shaking all for the crowd. literally hundreds of thousands of people, and we randomly spotted liz ensz (she didn't see us though)
>hanging out at tompkins square park, throwing baseball. ate falafel then a veggie dog.
>geared up to go out (more music and beer in the back patio)
>hanging out in front of de la vega's and getting free t-shirts ("lettuce pray" and "ny is perfectly unperfect") and cookies (chocolate chip)
>out to more beers and food, meeting up with some friends of ben and jim's.
>ate at japano-noodle shop of unremembered name but memorably great food and more beer
>KGB bar
>onwards into the cool night with only jim, other's falling back to sleep at the apartment
>tile bar, more drinks
>hanging out with jim on back patio, can't remember what we said but I remember laughing so hard and the next morning jim had written down the word "trungus" and I had vague stirrings of memory, fought through hangover
>eating slowly at a nice veggie cafe huevos new yorkos.
>after resting and jim leaving for work, subbing over to brooklyn to check out neighborhood I would most likely actually be able to live in (unlike beautiful, impossible east village).
>brooklyn is wonderful. determine liveableness immediately.
>meet up with ben's old business school friends on their brooklyn stoop over beers and a bag of jalepeno chips which I bought (one of the few things I paid for all weekend) and ate.
>dinner at izakaya (japano-bar with bar food--not clean sushi) with brian's friends
>early night (1am)
>next morning breakfast with ben after goodbyes with brian (flying away) and jim (off to work)
>casualy stroll through tompkins, stopping at dog run, onward through the east village stopping off at several comm. gardens for cigarettes (ben) and musings.
>joe flys away

hard to leave, but good to be back to molly and kitty (who doesn't pee on me) and studio. I think I caught jim's throat bug but I might just be recovering from plane air to desert air. either way, jim keller is a dirty disease spreader. just kidding, I would suffer ebola to hang out with those guys in their elements.

I picked up "the national" from ben--pleasant and plaintive, hard to get into at first but we'll see maybe. also the new wilco, can't get this one out of my head. seems like a really solid album, a bit soft but not simple, a bit dorky but not self concious.

read the 4th dune book, god emperor of dune, exclusively on plane rides this weekend. by far the worst so far in the series. a slow and confusing fizzle into nothing. I'd like to say it's completely unnecessary but it seems to heavily precipitate the next book, which had better make up much lost ground.

this week continue to ceramify, eat nice cold meals with molly, and prepare for the much anticipated journey to minnesota. maybe I'll look to get aquatic at some point. it's starting to blaze here.

two gems

in this first one there are a number of great musicians on stage. to me it's clear that blue-panted guitarist adrian belew steals the stage. the song is a little long, but it comes guaranteed to excite you at work.

crosseyed and painless

this next one is a juicy gem, featuring belew's heir apparent, jonny greenwood. upon closer inspection, radiohead is in top form on hail to the thief.

for example

a crass example of "cultural ammunition"

this week

I've returned solidly to the studio. this entire week I've been cleaning up the studio and doing varioius chores that I've been saving up for summer. Helping me are my two lovely assistants, Hannah and Kash, both kids that got A's in my class. these guys have agreed to help me out for free, for the time being, in exchange for potting time and knowledge. basically we've been having a blast and also working our butts off. some of the things we've done:

>recycled appx. 500lbs of clay. we do not have a pug mill. only a potter will know that this means we worked our asses off to get this task done. laypeople, imagine the scene in holy grail where the peasants are slopping around in shit. we didn't have any run-ins with the king and instead of shit we had clay, but basically that was it for the first day.

>scraped and re-washed appx. 25 kiln shelves.

>moved the kiln to a more desirable location in the kiln room.

>removed a defunct and unneeded test kiln from the kiln room.

>trashed two ware cart-loads of unclaimed student work.

>hauled two trash cart-loads of trash.

>organized glazes and underglazes.

>organized tools.

>glazed a kiln-load of crap for testing the new glazes, which are currently being fired.

>disassembled the kiln room ware cart, removed a massive and unneeded exhaust vent, then reassembled the ware cart in a new place.

We have a few more nitsy bitsy things to take of tomorrow, like cleaning the entire studio, and then come monday we will begin producing pottery. oh yeah, pottery studio... that's what you do there, you make things. I thought we just cleaned and rearranged stuff. my assistants are both a real hoot and I think irene will give them a stipend for their work. the stipend will most likely be less than half of minimum wage, but at least it will take pressure off of their parents telling them to get a job.

in other alma news I have accepted a nice contract for next year as a visiting artists. this means that I will be an independent contractor, have to do my own taxes, and bill the school for my hours. it sounds very adult-like and there will be somewhat of a learning curve for me, who's never done taxes at all or had to think about that stuff. but I'm very excited by the potential and by the professional growth and opportunity that this presents. also, I will be making more than twice as much as an americorps stipend. also, I can expense a laptop.

in related news, molly will be working for the mesilla valley youth foundation--the fiscal entity that feeds alma. her job will revolve around a new afterschool program in gadsden junior high. she will be managing the americorps art program there, which is about 20 miles south of las cruces on the border of texas and mexico (pronouned tay-has and meh-hico down there). this job sounds very tough--99% latino, very poor, not a large infrastructure for the arts--but on the other hand this is right up molly's alley and there is a definite need for this service in that community. hopefully she will achieve great things. professionally she couldn't have asked for a better fit, which is strange because the job came out of nowhere (see last blog).

things coming up: going to manhattan next week for the weekend, howard's party. very exciting indeed. most likely going to the twin cities and lakeshore during the week of the 4th. also very exciting. howard's wedding is coming up and so is cousin bob's. school starts july 30th, not far away at all.

worth checking out: today hamas attacked fatah strongholds in gaza city. palestinian president and fatah leader abbas has dissolved the government. this is palestinians attacking palestinians in the FORMERLY israeli-controlled gaza strip. unimaginable hatred! ny times dot com has two slide shows of today's action. particularly gripping were photos of masked hamas gunmen inside fatah offices (office furniture and all) and also fatah men on the street shooting up into a hamas office building. there is enough cultural ammunition in those two slide shows to feed 5 artistic careers for life.

watching: the descent B+. pirates 3 C-. listening: little feat, santo & johnny, the unicorns, and handsome furs. reading: pale fire and the paper.

***
scientifically speaking: two issues I would like to see discussed in your blog: this week's US open and also "people who like to watch basketball", what's up with them?

more weeks

last week on friday/thursday I finished my first year of teaching. a teacher's first year, some say, is one of the most important ones. granted I was not a real, certified teacher and I don't know if I am now a "teacher," but I did teach classes all by myself for one year and now that's over. so I can say I finished my first year of teaching. what to say about it though? probably all the things you would expect. it was really fun and sad to say goodbye on the last day. it was over too quick. there were many kids that slipped through the cracks, but there were also many kids that I truly impacted. I learned a lot about myself and I know many ways to become a better teacher. yada yada yada.

it sounds hallmark-y to read it maybe but people that are still in school as students or teachers will understand that there is a certain magic in that environment, no matter the age group. every profession is unique but I feel something particular and special about teaching, about education. there is a definite stop and start; there is the element of potential and thoughts about the future; there is the opportunity to stay sharp mentally and physically--the motivation to stay on your game in order to deliver your best material continually; specifically for me there is the excitement of working in the studio everyday, of thinking 'hey, I might actually be a real artist;' and increasingly at Alma I think we are getting the feeling of 'hey, this place is ours and we could really take it somewhere significant and unique, make the school something rigorous and meaningful.'

many many kids, and I'm bragging now, and several teacher friends have been hounding me to stay another year. I wrote somewhat enigmatically a while ago that there is something brewing for molly and I that bodes well for the future. It looks like these things are finally coming to fruition as of today. Molly sat down for what turned out to be a 2-hour interview for a new position within the court youth center (the fiscal operating body of Alma). she will certainly blog more about the specifics of that position, but basically we just got headhunted by my supervisors.

armena began hounding me about a month ago about staying another year and at first I said no because we were going to china (we still might... later). she accepted that because it sounds glamorous (Dahktah Jones!) but she kept asking me and I came clean that china wasn't going to work out this next year but we were still thinking of moving. why? well because I dragged molly down here to allow me to take a really cool job at Alma and she didn't end up with such a really cool job and she's ready to leave. oh. well, there's not that much in her field in this town. oh, what's her field. well, let me tell you about miss molly... and on and on.

so after I tell her all the wonderful things there are to say about molly professionally, she leaves and comes back a week later and says, "we still want you to stay and irene wants to give molly a cool job too." whoa. long story short she completed flipped my expectations and plans upsidedown and it now looks like we will be down here for at least one more year. I think we are all very pleased by this, down here in new mexico. it is very exciting and flattering to be looked after like this professionally, and to tell the truth I really love teaching ceramics at alma and I think molly's job is going to be a really great step for her career.

details to follow.

this week for me was an intensive series of planning meetings at school. I was the only americorps present at these teacher meetings, but I also had the strongest opinions concerning recent events at school and ways to improve in general. what can I say? we minnesotans like to complain about stuff. the meetings were up and down, productive ones and terribly terrible ones, but overall I think we ended the week on a very positive note and we are communicating at a new level with the administrators. there was a lot of damage to school culture/climate when they canned all those teachers out of the blue and I think this week we did a lot of good work to patch things up there. we also did a lot of work in general on how to make alma a better school. I've been talking with dorn a lot about where we want to take the visual art dept. and what it will mean if we say a kid graduates from alma and their specialty was visual art.

we had a particularly candid meeting on thursday about issues between faculty and administrators. we met as just faculty just prior to the meeting to hash out and organize all our grievances. basically we just bitched about every single thing there was to bitch about as far as working at this school goes. then we organized that bitch sesh and called in the admins and laid it on them and they laid some shit on us and we made a plan to move forward. I'm not used to those kinds of meetings where we actually put junk above the table and it honestly feels like there might be a chance to make positive change. usually you just let it simmer and accept shit as a fact of job-life. I must give credit to the administrators that they are willing to be receptive to that type of feedback. so despite the sometimes idiotic way they run things around the school, they seem to do a few crucial things in a really good way. I maintain that alma will either be an amazing school in 10 years or it will be dead in 5. we have yet to see if our plans will be put to use or if they will end up as empty words.

the faculty is also a really fun group to be around. I think I probably have little complaints about each person's working style and goals and certain things about certain people really do annoy me. but in general I think they've assembled quite a remarkable crew of people there and it is quite fun and interesting to work with them. we laugh a lot and there is also a ribald element of teasing and sexual harrassment that is somehow not a problem but a really funny element amongst staff members. we also seem to have a pretty fun time when we party together outside of school, like we did last night at admin. joie's house. she has recently built an adobe, wood-firing oven, called an "horno" in spanish (silent 'h'), in her back yard. she had everyone over for wood-fired pizza and beer and it was a merry old time for a thursday night. I'm excited by the possibility that molly won't have to just hear about these things from me but she'll also be a part of them. I think it could be weird to work in the same place, but in actuality I think our jobs will be far enough apart where we won't really see much of eachother at school. mostly I'm up in my room with students during the day anyways.

no plans this weekend. we'll probably have a small celebration on molly's achievement tonite. next week I'm eagerly anticipating getting back in the studio. I've acquired the help of two student studio assistants and they will be with me on monday morning to clean up and redesign the studio. also on the list is testing the new glazes and setting up sample color tiles in that area, squaring away the recycling operation, changing the tool crib around, acquiring use of the lockers outside my room, and then, perhaps starting the week after next, we will begin producing pottery for the culinary program and token gifts for irene to give out to donors and other big wigs (she loves art gifts). basically I told armena that that is what I wanted to do to finish my hours in americorps, and like most of my dream ideas at alma, she quickly assented.

that's all for now.

ps don't get me wrong there is still plenty of shit to complain about, at alma, concerning education, teaching high school kids, even fucking china! don't ya'll start to think I'm getting soft and satisfied out here. I'm still minnesotan.